It is terrified.
I can feel the creature's panic vibrating through the fog. It attempts to defend its territory by condensing the moisture in the air into high-velocity spheres of water, launching them at me like cannonballs. I don't even bother with a defensive stance. My [Void Gate] flickers into existence for a micro-second, swallowing the projectiles and vanishing, making it look as if they simply ceased to exist in mid-air.
The creature shifts its tactics, crystallizing the mist into jagged shards of ice. They hiss through the air, aimed at my vitals. Again, the Void Gate opens, and the ice is gone.
The creature's confusion is amusing. In its long life, it must have never found anyone like me. It must be wondering what kind of mage I am and what magic I'm using. To give it more to think about, I open another portal, but this time, it doesn't swallow—it spits. Its own water and shattered ice shards erupt from the rift, slamming back into its pale hide. The impacts are devastating; the water hits with the force of a hammer, bruising flesh, while the shards tear through, leaving holes from which more of that green, disgusting fluid pours.
The fog has become denser, resisting my every move. It is as thick as water now, trying to invade my body, but my Sovereign's Physique—inspired by Aria and the mages I've observed—has created an invisible atmosphere around me that filters out anything harmful. It cannot hurt me. I need to know more about this mist. Perhaps I should have brought Lilith and had her cast her illusions to force this thing to speak. Yes. I will do that with the next one I find.
The creature glares at me with a look of deep, ancient hatred. It is fascinating. This thing has always been the apex; today, it has been demoted to prey. I study its anatomy as it writhes. It is a slender, pale humanoid, but its head is a grotesque overdevelopment—an octopus-like bulb supported by thick, pulsing tentacles that wrap around its own heavy skull to keep it upright. Likely, it was designed to exist underwater.
It releases a silent scream. A psychic shockwave ripples through the fog, designed to liquefy a human brain. My shield receives the impact and informs me of the threat. However, my Perception had already mapped the emission waves long before they arrived—a redundancy in the system that I find distracting, so I quickly erase it from my shield's program. Of course, the attack doesn't affect me.
When the mental assault fails, the creature recoils, its instincts finally screaming for it to flee. It is fast; those tentacles allow it to scuttle across the rooftops with unnatural mobility, resembling a grotesque pseudo-spider.
There is no way to run from me. [Void Gate] opens. I calmly step forward and appear directly in its path, facing it. It stops abruptly, as if I were the devil itself. It screams again, a desperate psychic blast, but having reached [Clarity], my mind is protected by an unbreakable mental shield. Realizing its mind cannot reach me, it turns the abundant fog into boiling steam. The heat is intense, enough to peel the skin off a horse, but my physique was forged in the absolute zero of the Void. The steam is merely there.
The creature has one last card to play. It uses its tentacles, trying to trap me.
"Is that all?" I ask.
I materialize Void Gates that swallow the limbs of the creature. I close them, severing the appendages. It retracts the stumps, bleeding and in agony. It seems it has reached its limit. Time to end this.
I raise my hand. My second skill hums to life: [Reality's Blade: Level 1].
Precision comes from perception. My eyes might be useless in this fog and night, but with my Perception, I have a 3D image of myself and everything within a hundred meters in a third-person perspective. Nothing can take me by surprise.
My power manifests. The head is sliced clean. The remaining tentacles, suddenly purposeless, convulse and drop away as the massive head rolls across the shingles. The body quivers for a moment and then goes still.
Below, in the streets, the "Hollow" crowd lets out a collective, discordant shriek—a sympathetic reaction to the loss of their transmitter. I slowly expand my will, wrapping it around the cooling corpse. I begin the process of unmaking it, turning the alien flesh into pure essence to be integrated into my own system.
"You were weak... Too weak, little one," I whisper to the corpse, enjoying the victory.
I feel the essence flow into me, pure and abundant. My Perception twitches; now that this node is silent, the signal from the mountain is clearer. I can't tell where exactly, but now I know it comes from the top of it, where the fog looks denser. I can't feel Aria. I'm worried. But as I finish consuming the essence, I've learned to identify the other nodes.
"I must bring that one to Lilith," I mutter to myself as I start walking towards another node.